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March 16th, 20103 Free Tools You Should Be Using In Digital Marketing Right Now
March 11th, 2010by Jay Friedman on http://blogs.imediaconnection.com
I had the pleasure of speaking to a great group of music industry executives and promoters yesterday at Canadian Music Week in Toronto. The panel I moderated was called “Data is King” and we were to speak about using data to enhance the understanding, targeting, and results of digital media. The panelists included smart folks from Radian6, Nielsen, SkyTide and BigChampagne. Before we went up on stage we were huddling and realized that there was a real possibility that many in the audience had a total annual marketing budget that would be smaller than the smallest one of our products. So, I made this the first thing I asked when we got on stage and indeed, just five people in the audience had a marketing budget of more than $20,000.
Audible. Green 33, speak about free. Hike. First question for the panelists: What is the one free tool you would recommend that marketers on a very tight and limited budget be using today (and don’t say, “yeah, what he said.”) I got four very good answers.
1. The first and most obvious is Google analytics. Knowing where your visitors are coming from, search terms that drive them there, and the geography within which you’re most popular are all “must know” data and can be the start of a good foundation in a low budget marketing plan.
2. Next was TweetDeck, and what a great answer. Bands have certainly embraced the power of social media and use facebook and twitter regularly, but monitoring what is being said about your band, business, or even your competitors can be done through TweetDeck’s search functions. You get what you pay for in that TweetDeck lacks the ease of use and data arrangement paid tools will offer, but what a great start.
3. Next was compete.com. You may know we’re a big advocate of Compete as well through our partnership with them, but their free product is also a great way to peer into basic web site analytics of other web sites.
4. Finally, Quantcast is a must-use. It’s worth “Quantifying” your own site but the ability to see where else your audience visits frequently and information about your competitors’ sites will give you a leg up on less savvy marketers right away.
Sure, Omniture, Radian6, and CompetePRO are all much more robust but when you have $20k annually (or less) to market your brand, band, or product, every dollar has to go to media. If you’re in this position, take comfort knowing there are plenty of free tools available to get you started on a great path.
P.S. A tremendous point was made by Eric from BigChampagne that didn’t fit into the body of this post but is worth mentioning. Most data is now available free somehow or another. When you hire a BigChampagne, Nielsen, or any other company, make sure you’re not spending money on the data itself but on the analysis and insight they can provide you. Most of these companies have experts that can take data which would have otherwise taken your, or someone at your company, days or weeks to pour through and make sense of it immediately. Now that’s worth the price.
Email Marketing & The Call For Action
March 11th, 2010It’s important to pay attention to the length of the copy that you use in your newsletter. If your email becomes too “heavy” in content then the purpose of your email becomes confusing to the subscriber. For email to succeed as a form of communication it needs to be clear what you want your subscriber to do. Your subscriber needs to know why you are sending them an email. This reason should lead them to a clear call to action. The call to action defines the action your subscriber is to take after they open up your email. Most email marketers do not pay enough attention to the call for action. They painstakingly pay attention to every detail of their email template and creating engaging content only to leave the call to action as almost an afterthought. As a result “Click Here!” is the most frequently used call to action. Click Here is concise and there is no doubt what you want your subscriber to do but it doesn’t tell the subscriber why they would want to.
Email Marketing
March 11th, 2009Is email marketing dead?
We recently saw a post on this topic, and it made us stop and think. If you can get Twitter and Facebook updates from your favorite companies, do you really need to get email from them too?
We put our thinking caps on, and we thunk awhile, and we decided . . . yes, yes, you do need email marketing!
Here’s why.
- Email marketing reaches customers who haven’t jumped into social media. Plenty of boomers get email from their kids and shop online. But not all of them have started using Facebook, let alone Twitter. Email remains a useful way to stay in touch with them and let them know about sales and promotions.
- It’s a way to establish expertise. Many companies send out email newsletters just like this one on a regular basis. These newsletters aren’t pushing direct sales. Instead, they share information about topics that are important to your customers. This knowledge-sharing can help establish you as an expert in your field – whether you’re a catering firm writing about how to host a great event, or a golf pro offering weekly tips on improving your stroke.
- It’s a way to get the word out about sales and specials. It’s no big news that putting products on sale is one of the most effect calls to action available. That’s why mega-retailers like J. Crew and Land’s End have aggressive email marketing campaigns. Each company promotes a wide variety of sales throughout the year – sometimes it’s free shipping, sometimes it’s end-of-season discounts, sometimes percent discounts. But the sales are regular, and the emails announcing them can come weekly or even daily.
The rules of conduct governing email marketing are rigorous, and there’s no better way to ruin your reputation and get onto server blacklists than to violate them. But if you follow the rules, email can be a great part of your interactive marketing campaign.
